Apple hit by iPad sales guessing game So who exactly forecast Apple's fourth quarter - equivalent to calendar Q3 - iPad sales would be so much higher than the 4.19m the company last night announced that it had shipped during the period? Someone must have done, to prompt all the stories appearing across the internet suggesting that Apple's iPad sales were "lower …
The place where I work has just ordered 700 iPads. The Salesforce will be losing their Laptops and replacing them with 3g iPads.
We have just finished removing all Flash & Slitherlight from the Web sites & Apps. Guess what? They run faster and use less resources. Perhaps Apple's stance on Flash is based upon some facts?
We tried the currently available Android Tablets. Google are damm right in telling makers to wait for Android 3. Many of them suck when you try to do business stuff when compared to the iPad.
I'm sure that the situation will change next year. Until then Apple will really make hay with the market.
Though I'm not entirely sure that everyone could use an iPad for their business work. Some of us like to be able to type on a proper keyboard with a landscape display, value a reasonable amount of screen real estate, find a use for a USB port and might just be running applications that you won't see on an iPad in a month of Sundays...
Also, a quick scan round the internet shows there to be a reasonable number of people taking theirs back to Apple with unrecoverable errors (i.e. firmware restore fails to produce a running iPad). Of course the same thing occassionally happens with batches of laptops, but at least with those you can just swap vendor if you get fed up.
A cousin's perfectly ordinary iPad (i.e. not jail broken, just a modest selection of apps) just stopped working, and after two hours of trying to fix it Apple eventually agreed to replace it. Sure, apps can be recovered through iTunes, but any stored on it is lost.
So assuming you plug it in to iTunes once a day when you get back to base and back up, one can potentially lose a whole day's work with no option for recovering it. At least with a laptop you have options - take the hard disk out, do a running backup to a memory stick, etc. etc. It's fine if all the work is actually web based, but for locally stored data I'm not sure I'd trust it with my business just yet.
The last thing I want to see is a sales man or woman with an iPad. Regardless of the iPad itself it shouts style over substance. It would say to me they are just mucking about with toys and apps instead of getting on with the serious job, not a sales killer.
Having said that my old boss would be in a trance and would probably sign the order any order there and then. Plus be in awe of how great your company is.
I would rather the sales force have decent laptops with calculators to see how low I am pushing their margins!
I am lost for words. Really I am.
I can sort of understand giving them iPads for when they are on the road but TAKING AWAY THEIR FULLY FUNCTIONAL LAPTOPS?!
What about when they are in the office? Need to review and edit word documents? Do some excel calculations? Use that financial application that only runs on windows? Use ANY software they used to use to help them do their job properly.
You are taking away their swiss army knives and replacing them with a silver table knife, looks good but cannot do everything.
Shocked.
"We have just finished removing all Flash & Slitherlight from the Web sites & Apps. Guess what? They run faster and use less resources. Perhaps Apple's stance on Flash is based upon some facts?"
Duh... Seriously no-one needed to take a guess at that. Guess what: Wordpad loads up faster and is less resource intensive than Microsoft Word! I guess you'll be ditching Word now in favour of Wordpad right? No of course not.
Flash and the likes may be the '18-wheelers' of the web technology world but they serve their purpose when needed, and stating redundant information like 'Flash is resource-heavy' just screams the Jobsian attitude.
This is an article? It's a failing of Apple to set the market's expectations. A stock price is pretty much derived by analysts estimates. Specifically in this case, Wall Street's expectations that Apple would sell x products, generate y income, and have a resulting market valuation of z. Wall Street sets its target price to try and pre-empt that, the market then tracks towards that target in anticipation.
If the results come out massively different, it sends the shares into a frenzy, either up or down (both are bad for a company - stable growth is much more desirable). It's Apple's job to manage Wall Street analysts' expectations. If they don't, they're doing a disservice to their shareholders. If it wasn't done, you'd see share prices plummet/jump every time results were announced. It's better to ease the price up or down to the expected value, and the results coming out should barely cause a blip on the graph.
How do you think Wall Street sets the target? From info Apple gives them - they're not just picking numbers wildly out of the air, or if they are it's because Apple aren't letting their shareholders know their forecasts, which for a public company is just wrong.
"How do you think Wall Street sets the target? From info Apple gives them - they're not just picking numbers wildly out of the air"...
It's their interpretation of the info they get from Apple - otherwise every analyst would come up with identical results, and they would be classed as lowly-paid clerks.
You might just as well say that a punter should get everything right, because they can all see the SP & previous form from the racing pages.
Apple are renowned for marching to their own drum, and they do not feel the need to pay servile obeisance to highly-paid guessers (analysts). Quite rightly so.
Yes they are. That's why we have a global recession on. The Stock Markets are full of people who read horoscopes, rearrange their furniture to increase their wealth, or believe in cosmic ordering.
I suspect it went more like this:
A) they're gloming their hopes onto any stock that seems to be selling well, because (now they don't have portfolios of tumbledown houses in poverty-districts of America to sell to each other) they no longer know what anything is worth
B) they all own iPads themselves
C) everyone they know owns iPads
D) they extrapolated that forwards to a set of false assumptions
So the IT industry constantly underestimates how big the sale are, while The Street constantly over estimates the figures. Both sides get the numbers wrong, but claim 'they we're told', when in actual fact they didn't bother looking. They didn't bother looking because, either way, they'd prefer to believe the story the want to be true, rather than find out the truth.
On the bright side, betting on Apple stock does appears to be a sounder move, than how they used to fill their days, and the numbers weren't actually all that wrong. What seemed wrong, was the market reaction, but what did it tell us? The markets are full of irrational people who don't understand where money comes from. Well, we knew that already.
Apple's stock is treated like bullion, these days, anyway: just because the bullion value takes a sudden knock means relatively little to the people who actually use gold to make stuff - or even the people who make a living out of guarding big concrete rooms full of gold bars.
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